Albuquerque Journal: Meet one of those fellows who worries about climate change, yet keeps tossing brickbats at those calling for big low-carbon rules now or yesterdayalready.
The Albuquerque Journal, bless its publisher’s heart, insists on trying to make a profit by not giving its product away entirely free on the internet. But the hurdles to reaching stories are not all that high and well worth it for this one. Science writer John Fleck has a front page column called A Third View on Climate Change in the paper today. He interviews Ted Nordhaus, a local man who has moved away but still visits the region often. Nordhaus is chairman of the Breakthrough Institute and, with co-author Michael Schellenberger (the institute’s president), writer of a book that made quite a splash just a few years ago, The Death of Environmentalism.
This is skillful column writing. Fleck’s subject is a man with harsh critics on both ends of the climate change science spectrum – he thinks mankind is wrecking the planet’s livability so the skeptics snort at him as a lefty; he thinks enviros are out of touch with reality on how to cope with it so he and Schellenberger get lumped among the skeptics and right-wing obstructionists colluding to just let the Earth’s climate go.
But the column starts off nice and easy – introducing Nordhaus as a New Mexican at heart with deep roots and hence no pointy headed outsider out to socialize the land and thus perhaps permitting the large contingent of Western conservative private property rights zealots in the readership to keep reading without blowing blood pressure gaskets. The liberals will read it because, well, you know liberals – they’ll read anything, just out of curiosity.
He then walks through the “third view” of climate policy. Which is in part to work on technology and invest in brains without trying to rush costly carbon taxes or even caps on a public that, overall, is more inclined to embrace stupid denialism than take a hard hit in its purses and wallets. I have my own quarrels – if we wait until renewable and nuclear power (and conservation) can compete head to head with coal and oil that don’t get saddled with the costs of their “externalities,” it may be too late. On the other hand, this piece suggests but not in so many words, it’s been 20 years since the Earth Summit in Rio. For all the nice speeches there, fossil and cut-forest carbon emissions are roaring ahead. Ergo, the Kyoto model isn’t working and maybe never will.
Bleh. Too bad for us. So depressing. But maybe true. And, fortunately, for all the anguish over inability so far to put the clamps on carbon today or this decade even, the US and many other nations ARE pouring money into basic research.
Pray for breakthroughs. I’ll take a dose of inertial fusion, a slice of instant cellulosic simple-sugar-maker, a tall stack of solar cells as cheap as roof shingles, and a pile of rechargables that’ll drive an electric sedan for 300 miles.
Meanwhile, in the real, real world of renewable energy Dept (I gotta stick this somewhere):
NY Times – Elisabeth Rosenthal: Solar Industry Learns Lessons in Spanish Sun ; Given giant subsidies, solar energy plants overshot the mark, were prone to be badly designed, inefficient, etc. Rosenthal does plant a ray of hope at the end of this somewhat dispiriting article.
- Charlie Petit
